Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [254]
When he finally exhibited The Battle of the Amazons it gained Feuerbach nothing but humiliation. “A storm broke over my head,” he wrote, “by which I could at least reassure myself as to the importance of my pictures. I could not sit down to table without finding jests, raillery, caricature … beside my plate.… I was told that everyone, from the professor to the porter’s boy, was laughing at my bad picture.” Relations between him and Brahms reeled but did not quite break. When Feuerbach made a visit to Rome in winter 1875, he noted gratefully that Brahms showed up to lend him a fur coat for the trip. After suffering a nervous breakdown, the painter left Vienna in 1876. He died broken in Nürnburg, four years later. That Brahms never lost his admiration and affection would be demonstrated by his response to Feuerbach’s death—Nänie, a somberly beautiful setting of Schiller verses with their unforgettable opening line: Even the beautiful must die!
THE MELANCHOLY STORY of Feuerbach’s final collapse lay in the future in summer 1875, when the two visited and Brahms kept himself busy and cheerful in Ziegelhausen—free of the Gesellschaft, still putting off the symphony. He came back to Vienna in mid-September with good spirits persisting, and in November manned the piano with Hellmesberger’s group for the premiere of the C Minor Piano Quartet. Among the audience at the Musikverein sat Richard and Cosima Wagner.
They had come as a symbolic and conciliatory gesture. That year had seen a skirmish between the two men, settled peaceably through Brahms’s magnanimity. It had to do with the manuscript of the “Venusberg” music from Tannhäuser, which pianist Karl Tausig had presented to Brahms over a decade before. Naturally the score became a valued item in Brahms’s manuscript collection. An early attempt by Wagner to reclaim it had been blocked by Tausig, but the virtuoso had died (at thirty) in 1871, and Wagner had not forgotten the matter. Brahms’s possession of the score seemed a standing outrage.
In June 1875, Brahms received a peremptory demand from Wagner to give him the manuscript (“it can only be of value to you as a curiosity”). Brahms made a studiously chilly reply (“I do not collect ‘curiosities’ ”) agreeing to hand it over, but not without compensation: “If you are going to rob my manuscript collection of such a treasure, it would please me very much if you would enrich my library with something else of yours, such as the Meistersinger.”
At first Wagner was livid, exclaiming to Levi, “If a lawyer wrote to me like that—so what? But an artist!” Finally though, Wagner responded with a slightly warmer note and sent a deluxe printed copy of Das Rheingold, disingenuously inscribed “To Herr Johannes Brahms, a well-conditioned substitute for a sloppy manuscript.” Probably Wagner was befuddled by Brahms’s response, which was entirely sincere: “Your enclosure has given me such extraordinary pleasure that I can hardly manage with these few words to express to you my heartfelt thanks for the splendid gift that I owe to your generosity.”36
Thus with a show of generosity Wagner and Cosima dutifully turned up at the premiere of Brahms’s quartet. Maybe Brahms felt some of the bad feelings that he and Joachim had sparked with their manifesto of 1860 had been resolved by his good behavior. That he made himself minutely acquainted with the Rheingold score is shown in corrections he entered in the trombone parts.37
Brahms’s behavior may have created something of a truce, but if so it lasted only until satirist Daniel Spitzer published in the Neue Freie Presse some astounding letters of Wagner’s to his one-time Viennese milliner Bertha Goldwag. In them Wagner lovingly details his requirements for deep carpets, embroidered